Shock: Google advises UK peers against more legislation UK politicians have been warned to pick their legislative battles when it comes to regulating the internet, and focus on the underlying principles rather than obsess over the companies dominating the space. The House of Lords Communications Committee is the latest group of politicos to dip its toe into the waters of online …
Google should be careful what they wish for.
My Lords, I present this bill that would ban Google from operating in the UK post Brexit. They clearly have a monopoly on internet search and also supply the software at that runs most of the mobile phones in use in the Country and finally, they pay little or no corporation tax to HMRC. They are clearly taking the piss and need to be dealt with.
[three months later]
All those in Favour?
My Lords, the bill restricting Google has passed despite a number of members of this place being exposed in a clear smear campaign remisicent of those of the Daily Mail.
You obviously know nothing about the "freetards" you wail about.
What we want is for the websites, and advertising companies to take responsibility, and liability, for the virus-laden ads they have no problems slinging towards our computers. Until such time, we will keep our ad-blockers enabled.
Most of us would be happy to pay in the form of microtransactions to the websites we like, if they had a business model to support them.
There is some sense being talked in the article. Up to a point. They need to legislate towards the outcome they want to achieve, and not against particular implementations. That affords a certain degree of future-proofing against changes in tech and the services on offer.
That being said, Google, et al are still full of shit need to be taken to task. Their entire "we're just a platform" argument needs to be exposed for the nonsense it is. They're currently making money out of hosting some truly vile content and can't keep hiding behind the platform excuse and then claiming AI will solve everything and block everything that shouldn't be there. There's no way for it to be done programmatically at the moment so instead of making bullshit promises they should hire enough people to be able to vet content properly. And that way they'd have something to spend some of their dirty billions on.
A quick Google tells me that 300 hours of video are uploaded to Youtube every minute. One person can check 1 minute of video every minute just to keep up.
300*60=18,000 people actively managing this 24/7 at 100% efficiency.
If we assume 75% efficiency then we go to 24,000 people working 24/7.
US minimum wage is $7.25/hour
8760 hours/year * $7.25 * 24,000 = $1,524,240,000 in wages
rule of thumb for HR - it costs double the wage to employ somebody (+ extra HR staff to manage 24,000 people)
Bill - $3,000,000,000
This is not feasible, on any level.
So you control at point of upload. It's too late AFTER it's uploaded. If it's not economically viable to control access to your service then you can't offer it. Maybe if people had to:
1) Prove they have rights to the content.
2) Pay a service charge.
They want as much content as possible as easily as possible to sell more adverts.
Having Google and co talk to the Lord's about internet regulation is like having a fox give the chickens self-defence lessons!
The only reason I can come up with in good conscience for not regulating the internet megacorps, is that odds of the UK government coming up with a workable Law on the subject is somewhere between slim and none.
There are more 'mostly black boxes' that affect us all out there than the ones purely tech firms run.
Even slightly opaque boxes, where you've sort of some idea what clockwork is whirring about winding and twisting your life to the machinations of accounts, bureaucrats and other process and system slaves, you have about as much control of as you do the totally dark boxes.
Systems and processes are useful, but humanity has too much dependence on them and become slaves to them too easily.
"many of Google's arguments were reiterated by independent academics and organisations"
I thought that many of "independent academics and organisations" turned out to be paid shills for big tech, or nothing more than astroturfing shell organisations.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/24/google_amended_shills_list/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/google_astroturf_email/
How many millions do they spend funding shell activists deluded into supporting things at suit Google? AKA Shills
Lots of law ALREADY applies to Internet (Content, Publishing, Privacy, Ownership, Competition, Infrastructure, services, access.). Let's properly apply them and then see what's missing.
Absolutely do not listen to any large corporation that has a vested interest in advertising, monopolistic subscriptions, monopolistic services, monopolistic sales, tracking people, collecting personal information, violating copyright to sell advertising and capture people's usage.
That would be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet (i.e. Google, YouTube)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Facebook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Amazon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Microsoft
Apple, Oracle, IBM etc not so bad...
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Google should charge to upload a video. $10 via PayPal or Credit Card.
If the video is clicked by many the 'per watch' money paid to the uploader will offset the cost. If no one watches people will soon get fed up with paying for their cat/dog/budgie/silly-prank to be uploaded. The reduced number of uploads will allow the hard pressed Google monitors to focus on the really nasty stuff which I have no doubt is there.
Oh and a further $5 if your video uses a robotic voice or has inane background 'music'.
Reading the article, it seems the committee is mostly talking sense. Other contributors: the CMA, Full Fact, are talking sense. NSPCC is armwaving, but maybe digging deeper would find a sensible basis for that too.
And Google is talking sense. But that's too much for some, so we had to make a story of it. Yes of course we all know their financial interest: I guess the committee is perhaps better at putting that into context than posturing politicos, journos, and the peanut gallery.
Google = "the companies dominating the space". More like colonising so much of the internet that it becomes a form of imperialism where they cannibalise economic activity in order to create channels to feed money to themselves, starving local, regional and national economies of resources. At the same time turning creative workers into serfs creating the content they need to run advertising over and the rest into nothing more than consumer drones to exploit at every level and in every posable way.
Just one rule needed for advertisers on the net. If it has a virus in it, the company advertising their product gets a 1 billion dollar (U.S.) Fine for each violation in each country that virus shows up in and is awarded to the disaster relief fund that can only be spent on disaster relief by that country when a disaster occurs in their country.
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